Stanford White

Kings Notable New Yorkers, Office for Metropolitan History

The architect Stanford White could conjure elegance. Marine serpents for porch brackets, a Colonial bed warmer used as a panel decoration, inchworm-shaped screen perforations, keystones bursting into flames: these were the products of his genius as much as majestically proportioned ballrooms or Renaissance-style facades.

His Villard houses, at Madison Avenue and 50th Street, feature dreamy blue- and white-veined marble, cut in one instance into a great scallop shell — a hypnotic quarter-sphere of blue cheese.

And the astonishing mirrored Venetian Room in the house built for Payne Whitney, at Fifth Avenue and 78th Street, has a series of porcelain flowers woven into the gilt basket-weave screen that forms the ceiling.

Born in New York on Nov. 9, 1853, White was accomplished early at drawing and painting, and soon showed remarkable design ability. He joined forces with Charles McKim and William Mead in 1879, and within a short time the firm was at or near the top of architectural practice in America, with contracts even in its earliest years for the Newport Casino, the Villard Houses in New York and other major projects.

The buildings and other structures in Manhattan that White had primary responsibility for designing for the firm include the second Madison Square Garden (demolished in 1925), the Metropolitan Club, the Century Club, the Judson Memorial Church and the Washington Square Arch.

Throughout the McKim, Mead & White partnership, McKim played the intellectual, learned classicist, poring over reference books; Mead, the steady hand on the business side; and White, the impulsive creative genius, always in a hurry but completely assured in his ideas.

Despite White’s success, the last decade of his life (he died in 1906) was a maelstrom of spiraling debt, compulsive buying and troubled health, masked all too well by an exuberant good nature. In an 1899 letter, he wrote that he faced ''debtor's prison'' over cost overruns on his own Gramercy Park house. In 1905 a warehouse fire destroyed $250,000 worth of furniture and artwork that he had planned to sell to offset bills of over half a million dollars.

In his mid-40s, White, who was married but had a penchant for young girls — he liked to give them rides on a red velvet swing he kept in the apartment he used for his adulterous affairs — took up with a 16-year-old model and chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbit. He introduced Nesbit to high culture and fine food, lavished financial support on her family and invited her over for rides on the swing. She became his mistress.

In 1906, the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw, whom Nesbit had married the year before, shot and killed White in a jealous rage in the rooftop restaurant of the very Madison Square Garden that White and his firm had designed.

The Arts/Cultural Desk

When the eccentric millionaire Harry K. Thaw shot and killed the famed architect Stanford White on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden almost a century ago, the subsequent ''trial of the century'' was a perfect storm of celebrity scandal.

Real Estate Desk

Few people know one of New York's most spectacular interiors. It's the 1899 Gould Memorial Library, at New York University's old uptown campus, on 180th Street between Sedgwick and University Avenues -- now Bronx Community College.

May 17, 2012, Thursday

TAKE a mansion for sale on a singular block of Fifth Avenue, designed by a Gilded Age architect whose work defined an aesthetic that forever changed the landscape of the well-to-do corners of New York, throw in a $49 million price tag, and you have a...